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The First Person To Ever Play A Wizard: A Short Clip
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7704379" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>And have also reached 5 posts! Without too much spamming. (EDIT: only 4 - apparently my counting/reading sucks.)</p><p></p><p>I wasn't a gamer in the 1970s - I first played D&D in 1982 - but I did read history when I was 14. The first academic history text I remember reading (as opposed to histories written for non-adult readers) was East Asia: The Great Tradition (later combined with its successor volume into a one-volume abridgement called East Asia: Tradition and Transformation). This significantly informed my development of an Oriental Adventures campaign as a 14-year old.</p><p></p><p>This relates directly to the point I made.</p><p></p><p>A player who wants to play a certain sort of character (say, a wizard of the High Tower) and who reads a supplement that gives ideas on how a wizard of the High Tower might be implemented into the game (mechanically, fictional conceits, etc) <em>is</em> engaging with the game. And is not just asking the GM to "provide a song and dance".</p><p></p><p>When the GM says "no", or complains about "player entitlement", I don't think that that is encouraging the player to engage further.</p><p></p><p>If the GM won't let the player use stuff from a commercially published supplement, I don't think that is a very good signal for the prospects of the GM lettting the player just make stuff up!</p><p></p><p>In my case for about 33 years, since I was 11 or 12.</p><p></p><p>Can you give me an example of a published work of GM advice that describes the GM as nothing more than "a player who rolls for the monsters"? I can't think of one off the top of my head - and the ones that I'm thinking of include classic Traveller, Burning Wheel, Gygax's DMG, the 4e rulebooks, and various Rolemaster books. I'm not that familiar with the 2nd ed AD&D DMG or the 3E DMG - maybe they're the examples you have in mind?</p><p></p><p><em>OK, so which of these are you advocating?</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>If your stealing of ideas from your friend Chris is a sign of great artistry, why is some random player you've never met, whose creative personality you know nothing about except from reading a few posts on the internet, showing a lack of artistry because s/he wants to steal something from a commercial publisher?</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>Sometimes I draw sketches to illustrate things for my game, but not very often because I'm a very poor visual artist. Most of the time, if I want to (say) show the players what a person or creature or place looks like, I will show them a picture that was drawn by someone else. Most of these pictures I find in the RPG books that I own. I don't feel any sort of shame in doing this - that somehow I am a lesser GM because I rely on someone else's illustrations.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>I generally take the same approach to maps - in this case, not because I can't draw maps but because it is tedious and I can't be bothered, and so take advantage of the fact that others have already done the work for me.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>A player who relies on someone else having done design work is not, in my view, showing any sort of failure of creativity as a player. In my view, the crucible of creativity for RPG players is not in making up game elements, but in conceiving of their PCs as persons within the shared fiction, and in the consequent declaration of actions for their PCs. That's where you find out how creative they are. I have been very fortunate over the past 30-odd years to play with a number of very creative players, whose interesting PCs have engaged in interesting actions. Who authored the mechanics of the game elements they use (mostly commercial publishers, sometimes me, very rarely them) has never been a major consideration.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>Is it your opinion that it doesn't increase anyone else's fun either? In that case, you must think a lot of people are self-deluded.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>But in any event, that's a very narrow view of what it means to use game elements published by someone else. Given that you describe yourself as a D&D player, I assume that you sometimes use game elements published by TSR and/or WotC. So when you write down "dwarf" on your PC sheet, that is the result of having plopped down $X for Gygax's PHB (or whatever book you started with). Presumably, when your PC found him-/herself in combat with some orcs or hobgoblins, you took advantage of the +1 to hit that Gygax told you, in his PHB, a dwarf receives when fighting such creatures. And, presumably, you don't think that made you a bad player who was not improving game/capability/fun. (I mean, I know from your post that you used +3 swords. That's not a concept you invented - you took it straight from a book that, presumably, you paid for.)</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>Well, the person who uses some supplement to add some mechanical element to his/her PC is probably doing <em>just the same thing</em> as you have been doing in playing a dwarf (or writing "+3 longsword" on your sheet). So however you justify that to yourself, that is how it is justified for that other person.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>I would say that it sounds condescending. You're are extending a courtesy to yourself - <em>you</em> can take ideas from rulebooks, like +3 swords and INT as a stat and % chances of stat loss or stat gain, without being damaged as a RPGer - while accusing contemporary players who want to use ideas and mechanics that they find in books of doing it wrong.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>You prefer a game in which there are random chances of stat loss, or other unexpected mechanical degradation to PCs, and in which - presumably - that can be undone (given that you imagine a player planning how to get his/her INT back). But even back in the 1970s and 1980s there were people who weren't too keen on that particular approach to D&D play - see eg Lewis Pulsipher writing critically about "lottery D&D" in White Dwarf c 1977 - and its relative absence today isn't a sign that players suck. I'm guessing that most RQ players c1980 wouldn't be that keen on the lottery approach to Superberries or +3 swords or whatever - part of RQ's appeal has always been that it is more "serious" than D&D - but that doesn't make them bad RPGers.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>This is pretty ridiculous.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>And here's my rant in reply: a GM who never reads serious works of literary criticism, who can't tell the difference (from the literary point of view) between LotR and Dragonlance; or between REH's Conan and Thundarr the Barbarian; will never be a great GM, or really even a good one. Competent, sure, nothing wrong with just playing D&D to discover what piece of geography the GM stuck in the next hex. But to become a "real" GM - ie one who can actually frame the players (via their PCs) into gripping and thematically engaging scenes; who can tell when it is time to dial back the pressure and when it is time to push things harder than the players ever thought would happen; who can create a campaign with its own drama, its own meaning, with moral weight that makes the players sweat, and swear, and think that they wouldn't have had just as much fun reading an atlas or an encyclopedia? Not gonna cut it. Such a GM needs to engage with all that "boring" philosophy and literature and criticism and stuff and then apply it to his/her own creative muse.</em></p><p><em></em></p><p><em>Also a more practical point: if GM flexibility and improvisation is so important, then why would I bother to work out all the quirks, secrets, pitfalls etc in advance? I'll introduce the necessary story elements when I need them; when they make sense from the point of view of theme, drama, pacing, focus of player attention, etc. (And it also saves on carrying around folders of notes.)</em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7704379, member: 42582"] And have also reached 5 posts! Without too much spamming. (EDIT: only 4 - apparently my counting/reading sucks.) I wasn't a gamer in the 1970s - I first played D&D in 1982 - but I did read history when I was 14. The first academic history text I remember reading (as opposed to histories written for non-adult readers) was East Asia: The Great Tradition (later combined with its successor volume into a one-volume abridgement called East Asia: Tradition and Transformation). This significantly informed my development of an Oriental Adventures campaign as a 14-year old. This relates directly to the point I made. A player who wants to play a certain sort of character (say, a wizard of the High Tower) and who reads a supplement that gives ideas on how a wizard of the High Tower might be implemented into the game (mechanically, fictional conceits, etc) [I]is[/I] engaging with the game. And is not just asking the GM to "provide a song and dance". When the GM says "no", or complains about "player entitlement", I don't think that that is encouraging the player to engage further. If the GM won't let the player use stuff from a commercially published supplement, I don't think that is a very good signal for the prospects of the GM lettting the player just make stuff up! In my case for about 33 years, since I was 11 or 12. Can you give me an example of a published work of GM advice that describes the GM as nothing more than "a player who rolls for the monsters"? I can't think of one off the top of my head - and the ones that I'm thinking of include classic Traveller, Burning Wheel, Gygax's DMG, the 4e rulebooks, and various Rolemaster books. I'm not that familiar with the 2nd ed AD&D DMG or the 3E DMG - maybe they're the examples you have in mind? [I]OK, so which of these are you advocating? If your stealing of ideas from your friend Chris is a sign of great artistry, why is some random player you've never met, whose creative personality you know nothing about except from reading a few posts on the internet, showing a lack of artistry because s/he wants to steal something from a commercial publisher? Sometimes I draw sketches to illustrate things for my game, but not very often because I'm a very poor visual artist. Most of the time, if I want to (say) show the players what a person or creature or place looks like, I will show them a picture that was drawn by someone else. Most of these pictures I find in the RPG books that I own. I don't feel any sort of shame in doing this - that somehow I am a lesser GM because I rely on someone else's illustrations. I generally take the same approach to maps - in this case, not because I can't draw maps but because it is tedious and I can't be bothered, and so take advantage of the fact that others have already done the work for me. A player who relies on someone else having done design work is not, in my view, showing any sort of failure of creativity as a player. In my view, the crucible of creativity for RPG players is not in making up game elements, but in conceiving of their PCs as persons within the shared fiction, and in the consequent declaration of actions for their PCs. That's where you find out how creative they are. I have been very fortunate over the past 30-odd years to play with a number of very creative players, whose interesting PCs have engaged in interesting actions. Who authored the mechanics of the game elements they use (mostly commercial publishers, sometimes me, very rarely them) has never been a major consideration. Is it your opinion that it doesn't increase anyone else's fun either? In that case, you must think a lot of people are self-deluded. But in any event, that's a very narrow view of what it means to use game elements published by someone else. Given that you describe yourself as a D&D player, I assume that you sometimes use game elements published by TSR and/or WotC. So when you write down "dwarf" on your PC sheet, that is the result of having plopped down $X for Gygax's PHB (or whatever book you started with). Presumably, when your PC found him-/herself in combat with some orcs or hobgoblins, you took advantage of the +1 to hit that Gygax told you, in his PHB, a dwarf receives when fighting such creatures. And, presumably, you don't think that made you a bad player who was not improving game/capability/fun. (I mean, I know from your post that you used +3 swords. That's not a concept you invented - you took it straight from a book that, presumably, you paid for.) Well, the person who uses some supplement to add some mechanical element to his/her PC is probably doing [i]just the same thing[/i] as you have been doing in playing a dwarf (or writing "+3 longsword" on your sheet). So however you justify that to yourself, that is how it is justified for that other person. I would say that it sounds condescending. You're are extending a courtesy to yourself - [i]you[/i] can take ideas from rulebooks, like +3 swords and INT as a stat and % chances of stat loss or stat gain, without being damaged as a RPGer - while accusing contemporary players who want to use ideas and mechanics that they find in books of doing it wrong. You prefer a game in which there are random chances of stat loss, or other unexpected mechanical degradation to PCs, and in which - presumably - that can be undone (given that you imagine a player planning how to get his/her INT back). But even back in the 1970s and 1980s there were people who weren't too keen on that particular approach to D&D play - see eg Lewis Pulsipher writing critically about "lottery D&D" in White Dwarf c 1977 - and its relative absence today isn't a sign that players suck. I'm guessing that most RQ players c1980 wouldn't be that keen on the lottery approach to Superberries or +3 swords or whatever - part of RQ's appeal has always been that it is more "serious" than D&D - but that doesn't make them bad RPGers. This is pretty ridiculous. And here's my rant in reply: a GM who never reads serious works of literary criticism, who can't tell the difference (from the literary point of view) between LotR and Dragonlance; or between REH's Conan and Thundarr the Barbarian; will never be a great GM, or really even a good one. Competent, sure, nothing wrong with just playing D&D to discover what piece of geography the GM stuck in the next hex. But to become a "real" GM - ie one who can actually frame the players (via their PCs) into gripping and thematically engaging scenes; who can tell when it is time to dial back the pressure and when it is time to push things harder than the players ever thought would happen; who can create a campaign with its own drama, its own meaning, with moral weight that makes the players sweat, and swear, and think that they wouldn't have had just as much fun reading an atlas or an encyclopedia? Not gonna cut it. Such a GM needs to engage with all that "boring" philosophy and literature and criticism and stuff and then apply it to his/her own creative muse. Also a more practical point: if GM flexibility and improvisation is so important, then why would I bother to work out all the quirks, secrets, pitfalls etc in advance? I'll introduce the necessary story elements when I need them; when they make sense from the point of view of theme, drama, pacing, focus of player attention, etc. (And it also saves on carrying around folders of notes.)[/i] [/QUOTE]
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